An old Irish curse goes: May the devil make a ladder of your backbones while picking apples in the garden of hell. If you’d rather offer someone a friendlier wish, try May angels bless your sleep with the smell of apple pies. This is part of a...
Quiz Guy John Chaneski has been thinking a lot about it—that is, how the presence or absence of the letters I-T can clue different words. Each of this puzzle’s sentences suggests one word containing the letters I-T, and a second word...
When Kentrell from West Memphis, Arkansas, worked for a granite company, his co-workers who were about to put two pieces of granite together would say I’m going to pull a seam. But why would they use the word pull for the action of pushing...
Sigrin writes from Albany, New York, that she misheard our earlier conversation about the expression shaving yak hair meaning “performing a monotonous, tedious task.” At first she thought we said shaving gnat hair, which she figures is...
Rose in Edmonton, Kentucky, notes that many people in her area pronounce the word idea as if it were ideal. That’s a common dialectal feature in the Southern United States, as well as Appalachia and the Mid-Atlantic. In parts of New England...
Following our conversation about words for TV remotes, a listener reports that his three-year-old son dubbed their device the emote control, which sounds like something we could all use from time to time. This is part of a complete episode.